… The embarrassing events of recent weeks have reiterated another problem the Democrats face with trying to assemble peripheral people into a majority (beyond the obvious difficulties of reconciling the interests and values of, say, black church ladies and Wellesley College gender-queers). This fringe coalition is fragile in another sense as well: if the underlying engine of your politics is hate (as suggested by all these hate hoaxes that are the KKKrazy Glue of the Obama coalition), you are going to attract and excite a lot of psychologically fragile fringe personalities. And they tend to repel the normal and healthy